Wireless communication devices, such as cellular phones, receive wireless access to communication services over wireless links. Wireless access nodes, such as base stations, typically provide the wireless access to the communications services. However, the wireless communications exchanged between the wireless access nodes and the wireless communication devices can experience different forms of interference. One form of interference is multipath interference. In multipath interference, wireless communications can be inadvertently propagated over different simultaneous wireless paths. These different wireless paths could be influenced by the environment that the wireless signals propagate through, such as buildings, trees, landforms, obstacles, water, or weather, among other environmental influences, which could introduce reflections, time delays, phase delays, dispersion, attenuation, or other interference due to the multiple propagation paths.
Receive diversity, also referred to as spatial diversity, can be employed to reduce the effects of multipath interference. For example, a wireless communication device can include multiple antenna elements, and place the multiple antenna elements at different spatial locations or orientations in the wireless communication device. However, processing the multiple signals received over each antenna element can increase processor loading, increase drain on batteries, or otherwise decrease the available resources of a wireless communication device.